Portrait Of An Artist As A Warrior

The fourth edition of the India Today art awards honoured artists who raise political questions and create works that comment and protest.

- Romita Datta

The fourth edition of the India Today Art Awards in December was a celebration of the spirit of democracy, of ‘agreeing, disagreeing and discussing’. Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of the India Today Group Aroon Purie pointed out that at a time when there’s “greater policing on what we eat, how we pray, and whom we love”, these artists are the true winners because they “say things we cannot, do things we dare not, and create what we cannot envision”.

“Great democracies produce great art, autocratic states produce mere propaganda,” he said, while applauding the brave, the bold and the beautiful of the art world and appreciating a range of creative works.

It was a day of celebration for art that talked about identity crisis, of the displaced and the uprooted, of activists killed, Partition, the politics of religion, and so on. Be it the expression of womanhood or the feminist movement in Bengaluru-based N. Pushpmala’s (winner of the Performance Artist of the Year award) depiction of Kali lolling out her blood-thirsty tongue, an icon of Mother India in the nationalist struggle and Gauri Lankesh dressed as Bharat Mata cooking saaru or Rajyashri Goody’s (Emerging Artist of the Year) search for the Dalit identity in a mud kitchen— the artists here were essentially political commentators holding a mirror to today’s world.